PRWeb Ordered by Washington State OGC to Ban iGaming News

PRWeb Ordered by Washington State Online Gambling Commission to Ban iGaming News
by NoLuckNeeded member ttwna2k

PRWeb Ordered by Washington State Online Gambling Commission to Ban iGaming News

April 17, 2009 (London, UK) -- Many igaming marketing and PR professionals that relied on PRWeb to spread their stories around the internet were left scrambling Tuesday morning when the company abruptly banned all igaming news after it received a Cease and Desist Order from the State of Washington, USA.

“I apologize for the abrupt notice,” said Cari Lyle, PRWeb’s East Coast Manager of Editorial Services. “This was not a decision that PRWeb willingly made. We received a Cease and Desist letter from the Washington State Online Gambling Commission requiring that we immediately halt the distribution of press releases promoting online gambling sites and content. As PRWeb is located in Washington State, we are required to be in compliance with Washington State laws.”

“Our clients’ stories made it to tens of thousands of portals and blogs via PRWeb so this is definitely a bit of a setback,” said Lyceum Media’s online PR expert Larry Colcy. “But actually, we use other wire services that get even better exposure, and we use lots of other distribution channels like email, our own syndicated news network, blog postings, and social media. We’ll survive!”

For many online business people, the main value in using PRWeb is that most well crafted stories posted there get picked up by Google and Yahoo News. Thanks to their relationship with OnlineCasinoNews.com and iGamingBusiness.com (both considered ‘authority sites’ by Yahoo and Google News) Lyceum Media clients’ news usually winds up in the big news syndication services anyway.

Bringing your news to prospective players is only one reason to submit a story to an online newswire service. For those that pay the price, they also support Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns. Colcy is concerned that PRWeb may be forced to remove optimized, archived news releases.

“PRWeb charges $200 to include activated URLs and anchor text links – the kind of thing that search engine spiders love to find,” said Colcy. “We have happily invested in upgrading our news release submissions due to the long term benefit. And we will continue to optimize our news releases and upgrade our newswire postings at other wire services. If Washington State forces PRWeb to take down its casino news archive then we’re going to be looking for compensation.”

“In a way I suppose you get used to this sort of thing, working in this business,” said Colcy. “It’s still kind of a slap in the face though, ya? Fortunately there’s plenty of fish in the sea. With other newswires, we’re doing some really cool stuff with video news releases that’s getting our stories out to a whole new, much bigger audience.”